Gordon Pirie
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| Personal information | ||||||||||||||||
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| Born | 10 February 1931 Leeds, England |
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| Died | 7 December 1991 (aged 60) Lymington, England |
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| Height | 1.88 m (6 ft 2 in) | |||||||||||||||
| Weight | 65 kg (143 lb) | |||||||||||||||
| Sport | ||||||||||||||||
| Sport | Running | |||||||||||||||
| Club | South London Harriers, London | |||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Douglas Alistair Gordon Pirie (10 February 1931 – 7 December 1991) was an English long-distance runner. Born in Leeds, Pirie grew up in Coulsdon, Surrey, and ran for the South London Harriers. He died of cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer) in Lymington, Hampshire.
In 1955 Pirie won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. During that year he had beaten Emil Zátopek the triple gold medallist in distance running at the 1952 Olympics. Pirie was an exceptional cross-country runner, winning the English Championship three times.
Pirie broke five world records in the course of his career, his annus mirabilis being 1956, when on 19 June in Bergen, Norway, he ran 13:36.8 for 5,000 m, beating Vladimir Kuts (USSR), and knocking 25 seconds from his own personal best. On 22 June in Trondheim, Norway, he beat the world 3000 metres record with 7:55.5, and on 14 September, in Malmö, Sweden, he set a new record with 7:52.7.
In the Olympics, held in Melbourne later that year, Pirie ran against Kuts in the 10,000 metres and despite the tactics of Kuts, an aggressive front runner whose bursts of speed were particularly damaging to a long-striding runner like Pirie, he stayed with him into the last mile when every other competitor had dropped well back. Kuts surrendered the lead for a short while, then made a sprint which Pirie could not match and he dropped back. Kuts said that if Pirie had stayed with him on that last sprint he would have dropped out of the race.
In the 5,000 metres Pirie took second place behind Kuts. Christopher Chataway, another British runner, had been selected on past performance. He had not competed at top level for more than a year as he was pursuing a media career. With Pirie and Derek Ibbotson, the third British runner, he was tracking Kuts and had moved ahead of them as they went into a bend. The Soviet runner was setting a much faster pace than Chataway had ever run. Chataway suffered an attack of stomach cramp which caused him to slow down, and as Pirie and Ibbotson came out of the bend they found that Kuts had opened a gap. Pirie and Ibbotson ran round Chataway but Kuts was able to exploit his advantage and won the race. For the latter stages of the race Pirie was running what was virtually a front race, as Kuts had broken away, but he was still strong enough to hold off a late challenge by Ibbotson.
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